The Sun-Fujitsu alliance aimed at giving each of them the same high-end mainframe-y Sparc line resulted Tuesday in a family of six Solaris 10-based machines dubbed the Sparc Enterprise plugged as the "fastest Sparc servers ever," credited with 50% more performance than current Sparc servers.

It consists of Sun-developed entry-level systems using Sun's multi-core T1 (Niagara) processor and Fujitsu-designed mid-range and high-end systems built around Fujitsu's multi-core/multithreaded Sparc64 VI chip. Sun's server won't be boosted again until its so-called Rock chip comes out next year.

The pair cast the backward-compatible boxes as "delivering mainframe-class reliability with open systems advantages."

Fujitsu kicked in the mainframe functionality like hot-swapable components, redundant hardware, instruction retry, memory mirroring and extensive diagnostic and healing capable. Sun contributed the open, scalable network computing.

The solutions, priced from tens of thousands to millions of dollars, are supposed to lean heavily on virtualization and offer highly granular partitioning and domaining technologies. They are configured for minimal downtime.

The pair says it's delivering on orders. Fujitsu Siemens will also sell the gear.